WordPress SEO FAQ Answered with Case Studies

I added a collection of SEO articles from top SEO experts, two weeks back. One of the readers of this blog asked me to write a new post about SEO but specific to WordPress. When I Google about WordPress SEO I found a lot of articles. Most of them are same, they discussed how to install an SEO plugin and how to setup it correctly. So I thought to write some different article. Here I am writing about frequency asked questions about WordPress SEO. I will provide examples or case studies as much as possible.

Is WordPress SEO Friendly Out of the Box?

Do you know that WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top ten million sites (more than 33%) on the web according to W3Techs.

But it doesn’t mean that WordPress SEO friendly out of the box. It means you can make your WordPress site SEO friendly with the help of a quality WordPress theme and an SEO plugin. Otherwise, WordPress does not become popular like this. But just installing an SEO plugin doesn’t rank your website high on Google, read Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide (by Syed Balkhi) to learn everything about WordPress SEO.

What is the Best SEO plugin for WordPress?

There are many free & premium WordPress plugins available with SEO features, which is the best of them depends on your requirements. Top 4 WordPress SEO plugins are Yoast, All in one SEO, SEOPress, Rankmath. I have been using Yoast since 2011. Yoast is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, but it isn’t a lightweight plugin and some users trust about Yoast has broken because of their famous bug. I use SEOPress for this blog to test the SEOPress plugin and I will write a details review about SEOPress soon.

Update: I moved to Rank Math SEO plugin because it provides lot of features than both SEO Press & Yoast. I will write a Rank Math Review very soon.

There was a poll on SEO Signals Lab Facebook group recently. According to that, #1 SEO plugin is Rankmath and #2 is Yoast and #3 is SEOPress.

How to Create a Sitemap for a WordPress site?

A sitemap is a simple file where you provide information about the site(articles, images, videos, etc) to search engines like Google & Yahoo. Providing sitemap allow the search engines to easily crawl your website.

Almost all SEO plugins allow you to create a sitemap using their plugin. The sitemap generated through Yoast, SEOPress, RankMath plugins is great. They will add only index pages to sitemap. If you want more customization you can use sitemap specialization plugin like Google XML Sitemaps to generate a sitemap for your WordPress site.

Do I Need an SEO Consultant even after Installing SEO Plugin?

Unless you have a very good knowledge of SEO, you need an SEO Consultant for your website. SEO plugin is just a tool to help you to maintain technical SEO. You need good technical SEO knowledge to correctly use an SEO plugin. Just adding a title, metadata, index/no-index pages magically doesn’t give organic traffic.

Is Web Hosting Company Play a Major Role for SEO of WordPress Site?

Yes, web hosting company play a major role in SEO. Website loading speed is a key ranking factor. That’s why you need to select a fast web hosting company to host your website. You need to concern about security also because Google doesn’t want to display hacked / malware sites on its result page.